John Garvey: Good examples of virtue inspire students

John Garvey

5/29/17

It's that time of year again — time to fight over commencement
speakers. It happens every May. Some Catholic college will feature a speaker
who has taken public positions at odds with the church's teaching.

This year the University of San Francisco's law school invited
Xavier Becerra, California's pro-abortion attorney general. (USF didn't give
him an honorary degree, an interesting wrinkle.)

Universities shouldn't cause scandal by honoring or giving public
signals of agreement with people who promote grave injustice. As the American bishops
have put it, Catholic institutions "should not honor those who act in
defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards,
honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions."

It's hard to argue with that. But I wish we would view our annual
commencement exercises as something more than an opportunity to avoid causing
scandal. (I could accomplish that much by giving the commencement address
myself, though I suspect that after a few years, parents and graduates would
skip the exercise.)

Ideally, our graduation rituals should have a positive purpose. I
don't just mean getting good publicity by attaching ourselves to somebody
famous and making the evening news on a slow day.

At Catholic University, we try to invite people who offer our
graduates examples of what they should aspire to in life, now that they have
completed their studies. "You are finished now," we say. "Go and
do as these people have done."

This was our practice long before I became president. The speakers
and honorary degree recipients we have held up for our students' emulation over
the years have included at least two saints: Mother Teresa of Kolkata (1971)
and St. Katharine Drexel (1939). Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, a member
of our faculty for 23 years, spoke in 1975.

In recent years, we have given honorary degrees to the founders
and leaders of influential lay movements in the church: Communion and
Liberation, Focolare, the Neocatechumenal Way, Community of Sant'Egidio,
Instituto Fe y Vida.

This year we invited Peggy Noonan of The
Wall Street Journal— a public thinker, author, historian and
journalist. Last month, she won a Pulitzer Prize in
commentary for her far-sighted columns on the rise of President Donald Trump,
an event that caught most Americans by surprise.

The commencement addresses we have heard from some of these
people have been inspiring. But having attended far more graduations than the
average person, I think I have learned two things that may help in the
selection process.

The first is that nobody remembers what the speaker says. This is
not because the talks are bad. Some are really good. It's because the
graduates' minds, and their parents', are fixed on the life-changing events of
the weekend, and it's hard to pay attention.

The second is that people do remember who the speaker was.
Commencement speakers do communicate an important parting lesson. But the
lesson is embodied in the life of the honoree. This should not be so
surprising. Isn't this how we always learn the practice of virtue?

Virtue is a habit, not a bit of information. We acquire it by
copying good examples. St. Bonaventure, in his little treatise "Bringing
Forth Christ," advises, "Seek the company of good people. If you
share their company, you will also share their virtue." If we keep that
thought in mind, we are less likely to cause a stir by inviting someone
unworthy of the honor.